AMD Mantle Now Supported in Battlefield 4 – NVIDIA Users Get Game Updates

Posted by Nathan Kirsch| Thu, Jan 30, 2014 - 8:42 AM

Hours ago a Battlefield 4 Mantle patch was released by DICE as adds support for the AMD Mantle Graphics API. This means that there is finally a game title that supports AMD Mantle, but AMD has yet to release the necessary AMD Catalyst 13.35 or 14.1 beta drivers to get Mantle working. AMD hopes to have public Mantle drivers this month and told Legit Reviews that they just made a new build overnight. EA-DICE has a well written blog post up on the BF4 Battlelog that talks about the Mantle patch, how to use it and even some performance numbers.

How to enable Mantle

For starters the game patch is just shy of 1.23GB and will be needed first. You then need AMD Catalyst 14.1 Beta drivers, which will be located here once AMD posts them. You then need an AMD Radeon GPU with Graphics Core Next, but right now not all GPUs are supported. AMD Catalyst 14.1 initially supports the AMD Radeon R9 290X, R9 290, R7 260X and the new “Kaveri” APU. It also only works on systems running Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 (64-bit).

After the latest BF4 patch is installed through Origin you’ll have to go into the video options menu and change the “Graphics API” option from DirectX 11 to Mantle and then restart the game for the change to enable. If you have the proper drivers installed along with a supported OS and video card that should be it.

“Battlefield 4 on PC is already quite heavily optimized using DirectX 11 and DirectX 11.1, but with Mantle we are able to go even further: we’ve significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas.

The biggest performance gains can be seen when the game is bottlenecked by the CPU which can be quite common even on high-end machines and this was main goal to improve on with Mantle. We’ve also been able to streamline and optimize some of the GPU workload. The end result is that game performance is improved in virtually all scenarios in Battlefield 4 on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 when running with Mantle!

This update is the first release of our new Mantle renderer, and we will continue to provide more tuning for different types of configurations in future updates.” – Johan Andersson

EA-DICE has tried to simplify measuring performance in the game and have added a new tool to the in-game console to record frame times for later analysis. Simply run “PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable 1″ to start saving frame times and “PerfOverlay.FrameFileLogEnable 0″ to stop. The resulting .csv file will be located in Documents/Battlefield 4 which can be opened & graphed by Excel or other applications for viewing. Another in-game tool that is useful to use is “Render.DrawScreenInfo 1″ that will now show additional on-screen information about your CPU & GPU config, resolution and as well as if Mantle or DirectX 11 is used for rendering.

Every system will see different performance gains, but EA-DICE tested out the Mantle patch on three different systems and three different test cases and found between 14-58% performance increases. We can’t wait to do our own testing!

YOUDIEMOFO

This is all a mute subject anyways…… Look at the image comparisons between this mantle and dx11…… All screen shots I’ve seen have mantle looking so horrible in comparison to anything in dx11.. Almost like the quality is effected when using mantle.

Maybe I was on a biased site, but from what I saw I am not convinced at all.

I will get my beast of a system powered this week and check to see what my 3970X @ 4.8GHZ along with quad TITANS and 65GB of siiiiick g skill ram can do…. See about this “CPU” optimization that is supposed to be for both green and red teams.

darren evans

This is stupid!! ok so mantle utilises all of the cores for more performance, brilliant. It shows the 12 logical cores as been 58percent faster yet its the only setup with 2 x r9 290x cards. This is no comparison of cpu performance, if anything this is a comparison of different pcs altogether. Of course a 6 core intel cpu with 2 290x cards will be faster than a quad core with a way behing 7970. This does not show the potential of mantle. There is a page showing that mantle reduces graphics qualiy so im guessing this will NOT take over directx. Dx12 could feature similar performance boosts without the graphics drop, what then?

darren evans

Btw i hope mantle succeeds so i can but a amd card next time around. They are cheaper and afterall im a pc gamer, i want more performance whether its cheaper or not so aslong as mantle does have only positive performance boosts, im in.

basroil

What the hell is this setup? Three different computers for three different maps with three different settings. And not a single image to back up that Ultra 1080 MSAA looks the same on both? I’m smelling Mantle’s limitations already, seems like it completely fails to work as advertized in the real world.

Dogtanion

Couldn’t agree more.

Where’s the control.

All this say’s is, “hey I used a more power GFX card, on a different OS, with a different CPU, on a different level, on different settings, and they all ran differently!”.

john

BF4 is poorly optimized so DICE is trying to fix it by any means necessary

Juni0rM1nt

A SB 3970X is running at default clocks. Of course the two Radeon 290X will bottleneck the CPU. Try O/C it to let’s say, 4.4GHz!

Ronnie

nothing can bottleneck 3970X even at stock speeds, not even 4-way 290X/780Ti, you sure you know how bottleneck involves in computing? what you said was an absurd statement, even mid-range Haswell i5 at stock speeds will run 2-way 290X just perfectly fine.

Juni0rM1nt

Quote: The biggest performance gains can be seen when the game is bottlenecked
by the CPU which can be quite common even on high-end machines and this
was main goal to improve on with Mantle. We’ve also been able to
streamline and optimize some of the GPU workload. The end result is that
game performance is improved in virtually all scenarios in Battlefield 4
on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 when running with Mantle!/Quote

Read!

Ronnie

lol I don’t buy into “quotes” made by manufacturers because they obviously want to market/sell their stuff.

You certainly don’t gain the most when CPU is bottlenecked, the most gain is when BOTH CPU and GPU work sequentially(meaning: GPU ordering an amount of calls that can be answered by CPU ON TIME without leaving unresponded calls by GPU for the next cycle)

In our times the reason that CPU or GPU is being bottlenecked isn’t because of the actual hardware at all, it’s just purely poor Windows 7/8 and DirectX optimization on gaming engines so then game results not being able to properly/efficiently utilize the cores, and the result of this mess the cores being sprayed in sloppy way(that’s why you see when one of your core’s is busy up to 80% and another two cores up to 20%) this is just pure bad optimization and it creates the bottleneckes; So what Mantle does is provides better CPU optimization and by doing so it makes GPUs make relatively less calls which can be enough quicker answered by CPU, so Mantle just PREVENTS bottlenecks by better optimazing CPU power.

Juni0rM1nt

Stock clock on the i7-3970X…?! Of course it will bottleneck the two 290x’es

bob

why did you remove the part where you said NVidia users had to download 1.2GB worth of absolute crap, I thought that was the highlight of the article, so why remove it?

Mark Albiar

Nvidia needs to respond.

Serpent of Darkness

NVidia won’t respond. At the most, they will push out a new beta and WHQL Driver that could use AMD Mantle on BF4’s end, but that’s about it. I suspect, through Maxwell with Project Denver, NVidia will approach AMD Mantle in a sense, by hardware. This will be done by adding a CPU core to the Graphic Card’s PCB on the Maxwell line of graphic cards. AMD will follow with Project Seattle.

athenasius

if consumer cards even get the ARM CPU on GPU to offload driver threads your still using directx with all its problems and just throwing hardware at the problem like we have been doing for years which does not get rid of the underlying problem, also it has only been mentioned to be used on higher end cards for GPGPU so the card can feed itself independent of the CPU.

also amd doesnt need to follow “project denver” for consumer cards since Mantle gets rid of the cpu bottlenecks and problems caused by directx completely.

Tee Jay

exactly…

basroil

What’s this about CPU bottlenecks? DX11 is multithreaded, except for ID3D11DeviceContext, which is single threaded by necessity, just like your disk access or wireless access is single threaded. However, you can send 256 shaders at a time, so if you can only make 1000 independent calls per second it’s the same as 256000 calls. Of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, but in general the CPU limits are overstated for normal resolutions (i.e. not playing at 720p with low settings on a crossfire r290x)

dante

so in other sense nvidia won’t be creating simmilar api or beta drivers to support mantle, by maxwell they havetried to do so, the difference here is that amd is giving there users free performance and o the other hand nvidia is as usually flooding market with its range of nonsense & abruptly priced gpu’s, coz they want to recover there profits that they didn’t got from consoles this time so in short fuck nvidi -_-

Ernie

So, this will not support the HD7xxx series cards that are GCN cards????

fernandinands

Not released yet driver.

Video Game Chat

Probably still needs more testing with the older 7xxx cards
“You then need an AMD Radeon GPU with Graphics Core Next, but right now not all GPUs are supported”

Serpent of Darkness

The link that shows the Beta 13.11B, the AMD website, is most likely where AMD will list it’s new 14.1 Beta Driver, probably tomorrow. If you’re an NVidia user, you won’t be able to use the driver, but you can still enable Mantle in the game’s video options. If NVidia users BSoD, well, that’s their problem with NVidia. In addition, the 7000 series, and R7-R9 series are suppose to be supported because they all use the same GCN architecture. A 7970 is equivalent to an R9-280, but the R9-280 is just more refined and improved on the CrossfireX end. If I am not mistaken, 14.1 may have Frame Pacing support for eye-infinity besides DX10 and DX11. I would also check Guru3D.com for the driver. They are usually on the ball a lot faster than anyone, including techpowerup.com.